How to Escape Victory's Jaws and Snatch Defeat?

Through Improper Expectations!

The current elections have demonstrated quite clearly how needless bluster and arrogance may backfire horribly.

Though it is no mean achievement for the BJP to have won a third straight term, the leadership's declaration that the NDA would win more than 400 seats made a historic victory seem like a defeat :)

Even when there have been notable successes, misaligned expectations can undermine confidence, lower spirits, and finally result in failure.

This phenomenon applies not just to politics; experts in any kind of organizational context should learn from it. Within organizations, I typically observe two kinds of extremes:

1. The Repeatable Achiever:

Those who establish too conservative goals in order to guarantee a near-100% success rate. Their managers see through the "low-hanging fruit" strategy even as they tick the "target-met" box. Thus, the positions that these leaders wind up in are either non-critical or ones that just uphold the status quo.

The Unrealistic Pleaser:

Leaders that pledge lofty, top-down goals without making reasonable evaluations. They 'enjoy to please' and want to be viewed as all-powerful alpha males. They start a loop of overpromising and underdelivering, even though their hearts are in the right place.

To develop goals that work, in my experience, one must strike a balance between ambition and reality.

Thorough bottom-up planning, together with top-down objectives, establishes a framework in which objectives are difficult yet reachable.

While they are important, stretch goals need to be based on reality. Targets are challenging but not totally unachievable if a 70–80% success chance is the aim. They might equally be described as two goals: a stretch goal and a base-level goal.

This also makes it very evident what the organization expects of you, and you will still be regarded as a "performer" even if you don't succeed. CEOs admire fearless leaders.

Success is, in short, about controlling perceptions rather than merely reaching targets.

The foundation of being a top player is, never forget, "say what you're going to do, and then do what you said."